Regional Raiders Will Return

Laurence D. Cohen

Resolutions are made to be broken, as we discover with painful regularity each Jan. 2, as champagne-induced good intentions succumb to human frailties.

And so shall be the fate of the resolution passed in May by the Capitol Region Council of Governments promising not to compete for or attempt to steal businesses from each other.

This little fantasy dream of regional-planning professionals stems in large part from their hostility to Connecticut's local-yokel way of doing things, with each political jurisdiction hoarding its precious little tax base and cooing over its own little office/industrial park, and whispering that the conservation commission in the next town is riddled with communists and anti-growth vegetarians.

Regional planners and certain economic-development types find this local guerrilla warfare unseemly. To speak unkindly of the town next door, or to throw in a few tax breaks in an effort to woo a new business, is thought to be a blow to ``The Region,'' as it casts its net near and far to snare the next non-polluting, progressive, high-paying, low- maintenance, high-tech, good-citizen kind of company.

This thesis suggests that a region working together creates a marketing advantage over local villages going their own insufficient, selfish ways.

There is a certain complicated logic to all this. No individual town, presumably, can offer up perfection for a relocating business. Some towns have rivers where you can dump noxious chemicals, some have Sunday brunch and pretentious housing, some have low taxes and meager government services, some are clogged with attractive retail, and some have three liquor stores and an auto body shop. No community, especially the smallish cities and towns of Connecticut, can offer everything to every company that comes sniffing around.

The region has a variety of assets and liabilities that can be packaged and finessed and marketed better, the urban planners suggest, but the marketing plan gets mucked up if the various local players are sniping at each other.

So what are we to make of this proposed peace treaty among the warring factions? Will Avon and Glastonbury and Bloomfield and Wethersfield kiss and make up, vowing never again to launch a slick raid and steal away a potential addition to the local tax roll? Will the trend spread hither and yon, with East Haven and Hamden making love, not war?

And equally as important, would we in fact be better off if the combatants lay down their economic-development arms?

In theory and in practice, the answer is probably no.

This kind of esoteric regional-planning stuff demands long time horizons, ill-suited to local political realities. As urban economist Wilbur Thompson put it years ago: ``Local government may be immortal, but the mayor and council are not.''

To defer the instinct to go after businesses, to walk away from expanding a tax base or filling a half-empty industrial park -- all in the name of regional cooperation -- seems beyond what it is realistic to expect from local politicians and impatient local taxpayers. To be sure, as the urban planners keep insisting, we all benefit if a new plant locates in East Hartford -- but wouldn't it be so much nicer if it locates in our town instead?

That instinct, that competitive itch, whether you label it selfish, shortsighted or a rational consequence of local taxing authority, is also a healthy consequence of market forces that should not be thrown off without a great deal of thought.

The freedom of capital to flow where returns are greatest (and conversely, to flee from less attractive options) is a good thing -- and a healthy discipline to tame cities and towns and states that get too goofy or too out-of-control with taxes and regulatory burdens.

A peace treaty to control business poaching can easily lead to an environment in which political jurisdictions lose their fear of failure. A command- and-control system of doling out economic-development goodies would relieve towns of their obligation to be efficient and to respond to signals that other towns may be doing a better job -- creating a more attractive business environment.

In the worst-case scenario, this largely symbolic effort at economic-development tranquillity is the first sneaky step toward a regional-government, tax-sharing mess that would water down the accountability of local governments and offer little benefit in return.